If It Looks Like a Defect is It a Defect?

Our software quality metrics work group had a discussion today and metrics around defects became an interesting topic. One of the work group members said that the concept of a defect is not relevant to agile teams. This was clarified as defect metrics within the confines of an agile sprint. I felt kind of dumb, because I didn’t know this and it appeared that there may be a consensus with it. Maybe I misunderstood, but the logic was that there are no defects in sprint because once a problem is found it is immediately fixed in the sprint. I wanted to push for defect metrics from check-in through production. The later in the software delivery pipeline that a defect is found the more it will cost, so you have to know where it was caught. I didn’t get to dig in to the topic with the group because I was contemplating whether I needed to revisit my understanding of Agile and I didn’t want to slow the group down. I already feel like a lightweight in the ring with a bunch of heavyweights :).

Defects Cost Money

After pondering it a bit, I am still of the opinion that defects exists whether you name them something else, quietly fix them before anyone notices, or collectively as a team agree not to track them. Defects are an unavoidable artifact of software development. Defect, bug, issue…it doesn’t work as expected, name it what you like or obscure it in the process, defects are always there and will be until humans and computers become perfect beings. Defects cost money when more than one person has to deal with them. If a defect is caught in an exploratory test and it is acknowledged that it must be fixed in sprint, then it will have to be retested after the fix. Pile this double testing cost on top of the development cost and defects can get expensive.

Not to mentions, defects slow sprints down. When you estimated a certain amount of story points, let’s say 2, and ultimately the story was an 8 because of misunderstandings and bad coding practices, there is a cost associated with this. Maybe estimates are stable or perfect in mature hard core Agile teams or defects just another chore in the process that don’t warrant tracking or analysis. For new teams just making the transition to agile, tracking defects provides an additional signal that something is wrong in the process. If you are unable to see where your estimate overruns are occurring you can’t take action to fix them.

Conclusion

If someone besides the developer finds a defect, the story should be rejected. At the end of the sprint we should be able to see how many rejections there were and at what stage the rejects occurred in the pipeline. If these number are high or trending up, especially later in the pipeline, something needs to be done and you know there is a problem because you tracked defects. It may be my lack of experience in a hard core Agile team, but I just can’t see a reason to ignore defects just because they are supposed to be fixed in sprint.

Can someone help me see the light? I thought I was agile’ish. I am sure there is an agile expert out there than can give me another view of what defects mean in agile and how my current thought process is out of place in agile. I think my fellow group members are awesome, but I usually look for a second opinion in topics I am unsure about.